Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib was unapologetic about her choice of words calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump at an event Thursday, where the congresswoman referred to him as a “motherf****r.”
“And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Mama look, you won. Bullies don’t win,’ and I said, ‘Baby, they don’t,’ because we’re gonna go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherf****r,” said Tlaib, recalling the moment she won her election last November.
The congresswoman defended her words on Twitter Friday morning, saying, “I will always speak truth to power. #unapologeticallyMe.”
I will always speak truth to power. #unapologeticallyMe
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) January 4, 2019
In a follow-up tweet, Tlaib referred to the current administration as a “constitutional crisis,” saying, “This is not just about Donald Trump.”
This is not just about Donald Trump. This is about all of us. In the face of this constitutional crisis, we must rise.
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) January 4, 2019
Trump responded to Tlaib’s words Friday during a press briefing outside the White House, calling the congresswoman’s comments “disgraceful.”
“This is a person that I don’t know. I assume she’s new,” Trump told reporters Friday. “I think she dishonored herself and I think she dishonored her family, using language like that.”
Tlaib has long been critical of the president: before she ran for Congress, Tlaib was thrown out of an event in Michigan for asking Trump if he had ever read the Constitution, CNN reports.
While Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been hesitant to speak strongly in favor of impeachment, she has not ruled it out.
“We have to wait and see what happens with the Mueller report,” she told NBC’s Today on Thursday, referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. “We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason.”
Tlaib, however, has argued for impeachment proceedings to begin immediately.
“There is no requirement whatsoever that a president be charged with or be convicted of a crime before Congress can impeach him,” she wrote in a fiery op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, arguing that many of Trump’s impeachable offenses—including obstructing justice and conspiring to influence the 2016 election with hush money payments—are outside Mueller’s scope of investigation.
Trump argued via Twitter Friday morning that Democrats want to impeachment him because he’s too successful.
“They only want to impeach me because they know they can’t win in 2020, too much success!” He tweeted.